P Deutermann - Spider mountain

About three hundred feet from the crack, I felt the rock wall give way to a narrow opening. I had a penlight on my field belt, but decided not to take any chances. I sent the two dogs into the cave instead. Hopefully there wasn’t a six-foot-long rattlesnake denned up in there for the night, because if there was, we were in for some noise. Both shepherds popped out of the cave a minute later, so I decided it was reasonably safe for me to try it out. The opening was only four feet high and perhaps eighteen inches wide, so I had to duckwalk sideways into the cave. The actual cave curled to the right from the entrance. Once inside, I turned on the penlight and checked the ground for snakes and the ceiling for bats. Nobody home.

The cave wasn’t much of a cave-it was just a hole in the rock. It had a sandy floor and went back about ten feet, ending in a crack in the rock that was perhaps a foot wide. The ceiling started out at six feet but rapidly sloped down to no more than four at the back. I shone the light into the crack but couldn’t see anything that resembled a passageway, just more gray rock. Fortunately the cave was dry as a bone. I switched off the penlight.

“Okay, mutts,” I announced quietly. “We’re officially here.”

I shucked my bedroll and the field belt and then moved back to the entrance to see what kind of view I had. It wasn’t terrific. Because of the way the cave entrance made that initial turn, I couldn’t see much of the Creigh place without coming back outside. Fine for the nighttime but dangerous during the day. I went outside and sat down with my back against the rock again. The cave would be okay for holing up, but I needed a watching point that would conceal me and the dogs while giving me a clear view.

There was another problem. Nathan had come back to the cabin to get some dogs. If they were trackers, and if he went to Laurie May’s, they might track me up to and through the crack. After the shooting earlier, somebody knew I was in the area, and probably where I’d come from. In which case, I didn’t want to be holed up in any dead-end cave. They could just stick their shotguns into the entrance and leave the resulting gore to compost.

The cell phone slipped out of my pocket. I picked it up, switched on, and checked for a signal. This time there were two whole bars. I fished around for Carrie’s number and called her. She answered on the third ring, and I moved back into the cave’s entrance.

“Where are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded a bit off.

I told her and then asked her the same question.

“At your fancy cabin,” she said. “My room at the main lodge was on the government’s nickel, which is no longer on offer.”

“Good, I’m glad someone’s using it. I wish I were there instead of out here in this damned cave.”

“You didn’t tell me you had all this scotch here,” she said. “I may have overindulged. Just a little.”

That accounted for her voice and slightly slurred words. “Good for you,” I said. “Having second thoughts about resigning, are we?”

“Yep,” she said. “Standing on lofty principle usually means the next step is down. The loftier, the farther down. I should have eaten something. I’ve already got a headache.”

“Regrets?”

“Well…,” she said, hesitating. “I’ve discovered that being in the SBI gave me most of my identity. Now…”

“Now you feel naked,” I said. “No badge, no creds, no gun, no authority. And guess how I know all this?”

“Yeah, I suppose you do. I’m desperate to pursue this thing with the Creighs, but I’m no longer a player.” I heard a hiccup. “May have fucked up.”

“Would they take you back?”

“You know? I’m not so sure. My boss didn’t try very hard to talk me out of it, now that I think about it. Of course, he was pissed over what we’d been doing here in the hills.”

“Drink lots of water,” I said. “Get some sleep. Everything looks better in the daylight.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Daylight means mirrors. What are you going to do?”

“Laurie May suggested I hide out in Grinny Creigh’s hollow because that’s the last place they’d go looking for me. But Nathan just showed up to get some dogs, so my plan may have to change, and soon. There’s no good cover where I am now.”

“I should be out there with you,” she said. “This is my beef.”

“Right now you’re more useful to me in Marionburg,” I said. Especially with a snoot full of scotch, I thought. “I may yet need extracting if these guys get lucky.”

“I suppose,” she said. There was a moment of silence, a noise I couldn’t identify, and then I heard her say “Oh, shit.” Then the connection was broken.

I immediately called back. The phone gave me a canned system message saying it was no longer on the air.

What the hell had just happened? Had the Creighs gone after Carrie? In Carrigan County? I shut the phone off and restowed it. I looked at the shepherds, who were lying there alert, awaiting orders. Something told me to get out of that cave and to go in motion. I told the dogs to stay down and stepped out of the cave to reconnoiter. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Nathan and his dogs might be on my trail pretty soon, so I couldn’t stay up here on the ridge, and it wouldn’t be terribly bright to let them catch me in that crack in the rock.

Okay, we’d go down to Grinny’s. If Nathan and his dogs had tracked me toward the cabin, he’d think his dogs simply wanted to go back to the pen. I hoped.

I roused the shepherds and we set out down the ridge. There was no cover until I got within a hundred feet of the cabin, and then we slipped into a tree line. I went downhill along the tree line until we got abeam of the cabin itself. I put the shepherds on a long down and crept to the house side of the trees, some thirty feet from the porch. This was where Nathan’s black hats had been standing the night they brought me up to socialize with Grinny. The wind was slightly in my face, which hopefully would keep the dog pack behind the cabin from detecting us. Grinny’s reputed second sight might present a more dangerous problem. There was some light coming through the curtained windows, but it was yellow and diffused, probably lantern light. I couldn’t see anyone inside or on the grounds.

I was trying to figure out what to do next when I heard another vehicle coming up the pasture road below the cabin. It sounded like a modern SUV instead of one of the ancient pickup trucks these folks seemed to favor. Whoever it was knew where he was going and drove right up to the front of the cabin. I settled down in the pine thicket to watch as the vehicle, a dark-colored Chevrolet Tahoe, stopped and shut down.

For a long minute, nothing happened, and then the front door of the cabin opened and Grinny Creigh stepped out onto the front porch. A foreign-looking man got out of the SUV and greeted her in the lilting accent of Southwest Asia. He went halfway up the steps and stopped when she told him to wait there, and then she went back into the cabin.

I studied the man as he waited in the dim moonlight. He was perhaps five-seven or -eight and in his late thirties. He had a sharply outlined, close-cropped black beard that joined his mustache, and he had the prominent nose of Pakistan or perhaps India. He wore khaki trousers and a light windbreaker, under which I could see a cell phone and a pager clipped to his belt. He waited patiently on the front steps, looking around at the mountains and open fields around the cabin as if he’d seen it all before.

The door opened and Grinny Creigh reappeared, carrying a lantern this time and leading a young girl by the hand. The girl was between eight and ten years old and very thin, with flaxen hair and a pinched, frightened face. Grinny gripped the little girl’s wrist as if to make sure she wouldn’t bolt as she raised the lantern to fully illuminate the child. The man on the steps examined her carefully, asking her to turn around a couple of times, and then came up on the porch to lay his hands on her. Given what I was expecting, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t touching her in a sexual manner, but rather examining her, the way a doctor might. He looked into her eyes and mouth, asked her to cough even though he didn’t have a stethoscope, and felt her limbs as if to gauge how well fed she was.